Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Paul Johnson (1), Christopher Hitchens (1), Michael Korda (1)

George Washington: The Founding Father by Paul Johnson

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America by Christopher Hitchens

Ulysses S Grant: The Unlikely Hero by Michael Korda

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This whole series is produced by Harper Collins and first began appearing in the mid-2000s. There’s about a dozen or so short biographies from world figures like the three listed here, but also Balanchine, Caravaggio, Machiavelli, Beethoven, de Tocqueville, Freud, Muhammad, and Francis Crick. I previously read and reviewed the book on Machiavelli, and mostly thought it was good. What I began to notice more about the series is that the writers are primarily popular historians (or not historians at all), with a few examples […]

End of Year Final

Phases of Gravity by Dan Simmons

The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Stella Maris by Cormac Mccarthy

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

Liberation Day by George Saunders

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

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Phases of Gravity One of the very few “realistic” novels by Dan Simmons. Usually his novels are science fiction, horror, fantasy, or some combination of those. Sometimes his books are noir or suspense, and even though those books take place in the real world, it’s just not quite the same thing as realism. Don’t tell Raymond Chandler I said this.  This book was written in the late 1980s and our lead character Dan Baedecker is a retired astronaut who has also in recent years becomes […]

End of Year 1

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

Hamlet's Enemey by Theodore Lidz

Killing Floor by Lee Child

The Client by John Grisham

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

The Uplift War by David Brin

Monkey by Wu Cheng'en

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

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The Winter of Our Discontent – 4/5 This is John Steinbeck’s last novel and it begins with our narrator, Ethan Allen Hawley, trying to reckon with what it’s like to have once had money and then not to. He’s a veteran who came home to find his father had squandered the family fortune to make a risky investment (war profiteering) that didn’t pan out. So now a while on, married with two kids, Ethan works out a grocery store for an Italian ex-pat. He’s offered […]

Grab Bag

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

Mountain by Cixin Liu

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakmi

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson

Homecoming by Eddie Huang

The Matchlock Rifle by Walter Edmonds

Two Logs Crossing by Walter Edmonds

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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Mortality – 4/5 Stars This is a partial memoir and final notes first published by Vanity Fair and then in book form from the final days of Christopher Hitchens. There’s a part in the middle of every thing where someone tells Hitchens something like “God works in mysterious ways” and Hitchens wonders what is so mysterious about a heavy smoker getting advanced lung cancer. That’s the basic idea here. First things first, it’s not secret that Hitchens is a bit of a bugbear, and for […]

Arguably – Christopher Hitchens (2011)

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

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I made my initial rendering of this book 5 stars based on about 3/4 of the way through it. At that point, I’d read about 600 pages of Hitchens mostly reviewing books, discussing history, talking about contemporary writers and thinkers, and addressing a few off-kilter and slightly ill-advised topics like “Why Women Aren’t Funny”. That last essay, I found last strident and offensive than I originally remember it, because his title is more provocative than the essay ends up being. The book reviews here are […]



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